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Archive for the ‘Cycles’ Category

This is an attempt to understand via the numbers the concept proposed by Russian researcher Sidorenkov of a lunar year interacting with the terrestrial year to produce an effect of a ‘quasi-35 year’ climate cycle.

Sidorenkov in his paper ON THE SEPARATION OF SOLAR AND LUNAR CYCLES says:

The lunisolar tides repeat with a period of 355 days,
which is known as the tidal year. This period is also
manifested as a cycle of repeated eclipses. Meteorological
characteristics (pressure, temperature, cloudiness, etc.)
vary with a period of 355 days. The interference of these
tidal oscillations and the usual annual 365-day oscillations
generates beats in the annual amplitude of meteorological
characteristics with a period of about 35 years (Sidorenkov
and Sumerova, 2012b). The quasi 35-year variations in
cloudiness lead to oscillations of the radiation balance
over terrestrial regions. As a result of these quasi-
35-year beats, the climate, for example, over European
Russia alternates between “continental” with dominant
cold winters and hot summers (such as from 1963 to 1975
and from 1995 to 2014) and “maritime” with frequent
warm winters and cool summers (such as from 1956 to
1962 and from 1976 to 1994)

What follows are extracts, omitting a few of the more technical aspects which can be viewed in the GWPF’s full article here. Possible ‘colder climates’ get a mention.

Sten Odenwald of NASA Heliophysics Education Consortium writes:
Forecasters are already starting to make predictions for what might be in store as our sun winds down its current sunspot cycle in a few years. Are we in for a very intense cycle of solar activity, or the beginning of a century-long absence of sunspots and a rise in colder climates?

Ever since Samuel Schwabe discovered the 11-year ebb and flow of sunspots on the sun in 1843, predicting when the next sunspot cycle will appear, and how strong it will be, has been a cottage industry among scientists and non-scientists alike.

This plot shows the QBO during the 1980s. [credit: Wikipedia / FU Berlin]

Another climate mystery – this time the QBO – for scientists to get their teeth into, as the Mail Online reports.

For more than 60 years, atmospheric scientists have observed the consistent behaviour of a wind pattern known as the ‘quasi-biennial oscillation’ – a phenomenon that repeats every 28 months. But in late 2015, the long-reliable pattern suddenly changed.

The winds have since returned to their normal course, and while no immediate effects were detected, astronomers are working to understand if this was just a one-time ‘black swan’ event, or a ‘canary in the coal mine’ signalling unseen conditions.

It’s finally happening. Thanks to Herculean efforts by Niklas Morner, we are presenting a two-day conference in central London on the 8-9th September. Speakers are coming from all over the world to present their work, and it is not to be missed!

Take the 8-9th September off work and join us for this historic event. The first UK climate conference in decades which will counter the scaremongering of the IPCC with a cool, rational approach to the study of climate change, presenting alternative explanations, new data, theory and commentary. Topics include solar-planetary theory, causes of ENSO, sea ice extent, sea level, ozone depletion, volcanos, regional forecasting, journal gatekeeping and many more.

The list of contributors is long, we are packing a huge number of presentations into this two day event. Speakers include Niklas Morner, myself, Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller, Nicola Scafetta, Per Strandberg, Jan-Erik Solheim, and thats before lunch on day one! Piers Corbyn will be there! So will Christopher Monckton! See the full programme and the extended abstracts in this 35 Megabyte document for full details. There are also some travel and booking details on the geoethic.com website. An updated version is available on reseachgate

The Sun usually exhibits ~11 year cycles of activity, but the historical sunspot record shows quite a large variance on this average figure. Here at the Talkshop, we have been developing a theory which relates solar activity levels to the motion of the planets, and in particular the motion of Jupiter, Earth and Venus. Simple indexes of ‘most aligned days’ were devised by Jean-Pierre Desmoulins, and later by NASA physicist Ching Cheh Hung, which was replicated by Talkshop contributor Roy Martin.

There have been many studies reporting climate cycles with a frequency in the 60-year range, and another one has just arrived.

Two things to consider are the general idea of the existence of such a cycle, which has often been proposed, and the prediction that we are entering (to quote the paper abstract) the ‘declining phase’ of it

‘Now, it’s widely accepted that Stonehenge was used to predict eclipses. The inner “horseshoe” of 19 stones at the very heart of Stonehenge actually acted as a long-term calculator that could predict lunar eclipses. By moving one of Stonehenge’s markers along the 30 markers of the outer circle, it’s discovered that the cycle of the moon can be predicted. Moving this marker one lunar month at a time – as opposed to one lunar day the others were moved – made it possible for them to mark when a lunar eclipse was going to occur in the typical 47-month lunar eclipse cycle. The marker would go around the circle 38 times [2 x 19] and halfway through its next circle, on the 47th full moon, a lunar eclipse would occur.’

‘Because of apsidal precession the Earth’s argument of periapsis slowly increases; it takes about 112000 years for the ellipse to revolve once relative to the fixed stars. The Earth’s polar axis, and hence the solstices and equinoxes, precess with a period of about 26000 years in relation to the fixed stars. These two forms of ‘precession’ combine so that it takes about 21000 years for the ellipse to revolve once relative to the vernal equinox, that is, for the perihelion to return to the same date (given a calendar that tracks the seasons perfectly).’ – Wikipedia

Here we’ll fit the three precession cycles into one model and briefly examine its workings.

Two new connections between the Planetary and Lunar Cycles
1. The Connection Between the Lunar Tidal Cycles and the Synodic Period of Venus and the Earth.
The first direct connection between the planetary orbital periods and the lunar tidal cycles can be found in a previous blog post that is located at:http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com.au/2015/09/the-rate-of-change-in-tidal-stresses.html
In this post it was found that:
If you take the minimum period between the times of maximum change in the tidal stresses acting upon the Earth that are caused by changes in the direction of the lunar tides (i.e. 1.89803 tropical years), and amplitude modulate this period by the minimum period between the times of maximum change in tidal stresses acting upon the Earth that are caused by changes in the strength of the lunar tides (i.e. 10.14686 tropical years), you find that the 1.89803 year tidal forcing term is split into a positive and a negative side-lobe, such that:
Positive side-lobe
[10.14686 x 1.89803] / [10.14686 – 1.89803] = 2.3348 tropical yrs = 28.02 months

Paul Vaughan has produced a six page .pdf document crammed with the fruits of his research into the ways in which solar variation affects Earth’s climate. Several of the observations and concepts coincide with the work we have been doing here at the talkshop over the last six years to unravel the mysteries of solar system dynamics and their effect on Terrestrial variation. Paul has applied his stats and visualisation skills and thorough approach to referencing, including direct links to data. This has resulted in a landmark document which readers will find both useful and inspiring. It demonstrates the progress that has been made in solar-terrestrial theory, (with hints about the underlying planetary solar relations too).

Relevant to current discussions on the talkshop concerning changes in Earth’s length of day (LOD) and the effect of planetary orbital resonances on the Moon’s orbital parameters and Earth climatic variation; this is a repost from Ian Wilson’s excellent Astro-Climate-Connection website. Ian very generously opens with a hat tip to this blog, (at which he is one of the ‘collaborators’ he mentions).

[(*) Some of the findings in this blog post concerning the connection between the Earth’s rotation rate and the planetary configurations have also been independently discovered by Rog “Tallbloke” Tattersall and his collaborators]

A. The Connection Between Extreme Pergiean Spring Tides and Long-term Changes in the Earth’s Rotation Rate as Measured by the Rate-of-Change of its Length-of-Day (LOD). (*)

If you plot the rate of change of the Earth’s Length of Day (LOD) [with the short-term atmospheric component removed] against time [starting in 1962] you find that there is a ~ 6 year periodicity that is phase-locked with the 6 year period that it takes the lunar line-of-nodes to re-align with the lunar line-of-apse [see the first note directly below and reference [1] for a description of the method used to determine the time rate of change of LOD].

NB: The pro-grade precession of the lunar line-of-apse once around the Earth with respect to the stars takes 8.8504 Julian years (J2000) while the retrograde precession of the lunar line-of-apse line-of-nodes once around the Earth with respect to the stars takes 18.6000 Julian years (J2000). Hence, the lunar line-of-apse and the ascending node of the lunar line-of-nodes will realign once every:

The journal Nature has published a study from the University of Southampton and the National Oceanographic Centre (NOC) that suggests the the global climate is on the brink of “broad scale change” that could last for a number of decades. This time they are talking of cooling not warming. (more…)

By far the two largest bodies in our solar system are Jupiter and Saturn. In terms of angular momentum: ‘That of Jupiter contributes the bulk of the Solar System’s angular momentum, 60.3%. Then comes Saturn at 24.5%, Neptune at 7.9%, and Uranus at 5.3%’ (source), leaving only 2% for everything else. Jupiter and Saturn together account for nearly 85% of the total.

The Mars-Earth model is based on 34 Mars orbits. This equates to 64 years, which is 8². Since Venus makes 13 orbits of Earth in 8 years, we can easily add it to the model.
2,3,5,8,13 and 34 are Fibonacci numbers.

The story doesn’t end there, because as the diagram shows this results in a 3:4:7 relationship between the 3 sets of synodic periods. This was analysed in detail in a paper by astrophysicist Ian Wilson, featured at the Talkshop in 2013:

Well known hockeyjockey Michael Mann has a post up on Huffpo, claiming the ‘hiatus’ or ‘plateau’ in global warming which he says doesn’t exist, only happened because oscillations. To prove this he introduces a new one, which he calls the NMO. I think it stands for Numerically Magical Obfuscation.

NMO is derived from some twisty manipulation of the AMO (in blue) and the PMO (in green).

Just because Mann ‘invented’ the AMO doesn’t mean he gets to fiddle with the underlying data does it?

Glimmers of understanding are percolating through into mainstream climate science, this time through the journal Climate Dynamics. I can’t remember if Marcia Wyatt and Judy Curry explicitly linked these oscillations in their stadium wave paper, but it’s more evidence that our cycles driven theory of climate is correct, and that the 1976-2005 warming was mostly a natural phenomenon. It is likely to be followed by a 2006-2035 cooling phase, possibly accentuated by the lowest solar activity levels in two centuries or more. Unfortunately, the luni-solar dimension to the multidecadal variability is not explored. Nonetheless, this paper represents some joined up thinking in terms of the cyclic chain of cause and effect which connects the northern hemisphere oceanic oscillations.

A delayed oscillator model for the quasi-periodic multidecadal variability of the NAO
Cheng Sun, Jianping Li, Fei-Fei Jin Date: 06 Jan 2015Abstract
Wavelet analysis of the annual North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index back to 1659 reveals a significant frequency band at about 60 years. Recent NAO decadal variations, including the increasing trend during 1960–1990 and decreasing trend since the mid-1990s, can be well explained by the approximate 60-year cycle.